Wednesday 17th December 2025
Gullivers, Manchester, England
“Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?”
Robert Burns, ‘Auld Lang Syne’
“And you ask: will I write, with you firmly in my mind?”
Toria Wooff, ‘Song for A’
The night begins with a ghost story. As the lights dim to deep shadow in the small, close ballroom above Gullivers bar in Manchester, precise, unhurried footsteps rap against the wooden floor. The Librarian of Weeping Bank is walking down the aisle between the rows of the hushed audience towards the stage. With his long, beak-like nose and distinguished hairline, dressed conservatively in a sweater vest with a large, leather-bound ledger tucked under his arm, the Librarian certainly looks the part, like a teacher or lecturer straight out of central casting. He takes a seat, opens the ledger and begins to read.
It’s all a wonderful bit of theatre as, over the next half-hour, this curator of the stories of Weeping Bank Library delivers one of those stories with the assurance of a thespian. The performance is a well-balanced one, with tasteful sound effects accompanying the Librarian’s tale; nothing excessive or cinematic, merely the occasional footstep, breath of howling wind or creaking floorboard to accentuate the mood.
For those of us seated in the front row, the shuffling of the audience behind adds even more, for it feels as though something may well be creeping up behind us. This is the Gothic style in full effect; using mood and ambience and vocabulary to ratchet up the tension of the ghost story itself – that of a babysitter who is left alone with a child in a house on the wrong side of the Weeping Bank. Or has she, as she perhaps discovers, been left alone with two?
It’s an unconventional way to begin a night of live music, but one thing (among many) that I have come to admire in a Toria Wooff concert is their singular nature. Tonight is the fifth time I’ve seen Toria live since I came across her remarkable debut album back in May, and on each occasion different songs have come to the fore and made their impression upon the night. It could be that the folk melody of ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’ grabs you; on another night it might be the soaring vulnerability of ‘See Things Through’ or ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’ which stand as the centrepiece. To see someone live five times in eight months and still find new things to uncover on each occasion is testament to both the stable of songs and the creative momentum the artist is quietly building.
And tonight is, in many ways, the most impressive Toria Wooff performance yet. Almost a year to the day since her first billed ‘Somewhat Gothic Christmas’, at a venue within spitting distance on the other side of the road, Toria pulls out all the stops to ensure there are no lumps of coal in our stockings this year; that this will be a night to remember. Many of the finest songs from her album are played impeccably tonight by her and her on-stage companion, the cellist Polly Virr, and we’re also treated to some unreleased songs from her upcoming second album, including the haunting ‘House on the Hill’, a song which takes your breath away with its immaculate, bracing air.
If that were not enough, Toria also proves, later in the night, to be one of the rare musicians who can sing the hell out of a Christmas song. There’s something about the festive period that encourages ghost stories, whether that’s the long, cold winter nights or the Victorian shadow of many of our present traditions – including the Ghost of Christmas Past from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – and Toria Wooff’s ethereal Gothic folk stylings are perfectly suited to evoke it. One hopes that her Somewhat Gothic Christmases in years yet to come will prove, by word of mouth, to be a regular and hotly-anticipated fixture on the Manchester calendar. They certainly will be on mine.
After opener Natalie Wildgoose has followed the Librarian by providing a half-dozen haunting, piano-driven laments of her own – a stark, almost avant-garde reimagination of English moorland folk – Toria Wooff takes to the stage carrying her new, custom-made Native Series acoustic guitar, accompanied by Polly and her cello. With her new guitar of English yew, she decides immediately to ring in the new, opening with the unreleased demoniac interlude ‘Black Shuck’ and ‘The Morrigan’, both of which are expected on her upcoming album in 2026.
It’s the first time I’ve heard ‘The Morrigan’, which takes the legend of a mythological Celtic goddess-queen and – ingeniously, as Toria has also done on her unreleased songs ‘House on the Hill’ and ‘The Bargain’ – universalises it. Part of its melody recalls her song ‘The Flood’, but ‘The Morrigan’ is very much its own creature. Polly’s touches on the cello are almost a second voice, a call-and-response with Toria’s own confident, hauntingly clear vocals. “I cannot wait for what she offers,” Toria sings on the unreleased song. Truer words were never spoken.
It’s a bold opening, and Toria follows it up with ‘Estuaries’, a soft, pensive song that I am used to hearing later in her live sets (no doubt due to its lyric “then you leave without saying goodbye”). Its presence here so early in the night not only speaks to the dexterity of her growing catalogue of songs, but also suggests Toria has something special planned for the end of her set.
‘Estuaries’ is followed by ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’, which in its album cut is a full-band, steel-laden number which I’d recommend to new listeners looking for a rewarding dose of folk Americana. Tonight, with Toria’s new custom tonewood accompanied only by Polly’s resonant cello, the song is stark and wounded, and afterwards we’re given some insight into why.
“You’re all very quiet,” Toria says teasingly, in her thick, warm Bolton accent. “There’s something about being seated that makes people quiet, I think.” She tells us that she wrote ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’, and the next two songs she is about to play, about her best friend Alicia. “On the topic of being quiet in this room… erm, we never were.” The crowd chuckles warmly. Gullivers bar, here in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, was “one of our haunts.” She gestures towards the back of the room. “That little, like… where it dips in the little alcove there – we used to stand there because we knew we could get away with being as disruptive as possible.”
Astute readers will notice the past tense, and this isn’t because it’s a mere act of reminiscence on Toria’s part. Alicia is indeed no longer with us, and it’s clear that Toria – who dedicated her self-titled album to her, forever linking their names together – is deeply affected by her loss to cancer five years ago. In light of this, the battling sorrow of ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’ – and other songs to come tonight – becomes even more apparent. “And all the bars that we had haunted,” she sang in ‘Lefty’. “I couldn’t go back even if I tried.”
There follows some of the most delicate, vulnerable moments of the night, as Toria navigates her way through two more songs inspired by Alicia: ‘Sweet William’ (“I remember your skin and how we fed it to the clay”) and ‘Song for A’ (“You call me up, haul me out, say you ain’t got much time left now”). ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’, the signature song that follows in their wake, may be more recognisable as a ghost story, but it is increasingly clear what ghost lingers in many of Toria’s other songs. When I remarked earlier that different songs come to the fore each time I hear Toria live, well, tonight it is the lyricism which impresses deeply – across every song.
It should be noted, at this point, that Toria Wooff is no maudlin artist. If there is a melancholy to some of her songs, it is a sadness that she has diverted, as one might a river, towards art and creation rather than bitterness and gloom. It is a hurt that inspires rather than kills a buzz. What is more, Toria allows us a release with her easy charm and humour. After another song that must surely be about Alicia, the unreleased ‘Noiselessly’ (“there’s a part of me that died when you did too… I think we’re tangled up together on every plane”), she thanks the audience for their applause. “When you like it,” she says, “it means it makes the album. It doesn’t get cut last minute.” Introducing ‘Aleister’ at this moment, another impressive unreleased song, she begins to tell us what it’s about. But there comes a noise from the back of the room, something heavy dropped on the floor with a thud louder than any of the Weeping Bank Library’s sound effects.“It doesn’t matter actually,” she laughs.
And even were the spectre of her friend not resting quietly on every song, there would still be moments that would mark the night as special. On a normal night, ‘The Flood’, which follows ‘Aleister’, would be a stand-out moment. Enthusiastic applause greets the end of a song which has threatened to burst its banks, with increasingly insistent guitar-picking from Toria and some inspired cello flourishes from Polly.
“Let’s do a poll,” Toria says, as always a warm presence on the stage. “Are you feeling more festive… or spooky?”
“Right, so shout for ‘spooky’.” There are some woos from the audience, and Toria laughs at the hesitancy. “Festive?” she asks, before bursting into laughter at the response. “That was even more hesitant!” she grins.
The ‘spooky’ option having won (for now), Toria and Polly decide to play ‘House on the Hill’, an unreleased song inspired by her “favourite book”, Susan Hill’s 1983 Gothic pastiche The Woman in Black. It’s a truly special song, one of those that just seems perfectly balanced in your mind as you hear it, and it has that feel of being the sort of song that might see this talented artist break out onto higher ground of her own. I’ve taken to referring to Toria as ‘The Woman in Black’ in my previous reviews, something which Toria tells me after the show – as usual, she generously grants her time to fans afterwards – had left her buzzing when she read it.
It’s a moniker that fits her like a glove, and not one I can claim credit for, because it’s one that Toria has earned with her own talent and blossoming creativity – as the unreleased ‘House on the Hill’ has just shown. She has embraced this Gothic folk sound and aesthetic in the last couple of years, to the point where her older material (such as a 2021 single called ‘June’, a 2019 cover of Alice Cooper’s ‘Poison’, the Badlands EP also from 2019) is either hard or outright impossible to find and listen to, even if the music that can still be sourced in some forgotten places, such as the wonderful 2021 single ‘James Edward’, is compelling to hear.
But one cannot blame her for leaving her old music behind – even as she ensures she carries the memory of old friends with her – for this new Woman in Black may well be on the cusp of something special. “We had a big gab about [Susan Hill’s novel] in the green-room,” Toria tells the audience. “And about the 1989 [television] version of it, which is just incredible. And during that chat, I realised the moment that I must have just decided where my path led in life. When I first saw HER stood in the graveyard like that” – she mimes the disturbing, rigid pose of Jennet Humfrye – “I was like: ‘THAT’S who I want to be.’ That’s a great realisation to bring in to 2026,” she laughs.
But before the New Year, and the exciting (“but stressful”) new album release that is sure to come, there is still a Christmas to celebrate – and celebrate somewhat Gothically. ‘House on the Hill’ is followed the effortlessly pleasant chords of ‘That’s What Falling in Love Will Do’. The song is marked by some electrical distortion in the speaker at Toria’s feet, and I find myself wondering if perhaps a mischievous ghost has moved from the alcove to be as disruptive as possible once again in this old haunt.
In support of this theory, the distortion stops as soon as Toria acknowledges it and smiles to Polly, and we move towards the final songs of the night. ‘See Things Through’ is one of Toria’s most remarkable productions, in which she confesses to not knowing whether she’s strong enough to ‘see things through’ even as the strength of the song and the soaring music proves that she is. The beautiful release of Polly’s cello as the song crescendos is one of the moments that I’ve come to anticipate each and every time I’ve heard the two musicians live on stage.
“I have one more song for you guys,” Toria says as she takes in the applause. “And it’s a very important song to me. When I was trying to pick a festive Christmas song, I really wanted to think about something that encapsulated what the true meaning of Christmas is. The most important thing about Christmas. And that is: The Muppets.”
The audience laughs as Toria moves to a black metal lectern at the side of the stage and shuffles through a flurry of sheet music. Her eyes light up as she finds what she’s looking for. She picks up the lectern – “Very precarious” – and places it in front of her at centre stage.
“OK. So this is genuinely what I think is the best Christmas song ever written. Maybe the best song ever written, actually.
“And it’s sung by Michael Caine, in his finest role. It’s called ‘Thankful Heart’. And there’s a little call-and-response. If you do know it, feel free to join in.”
What follows is a sweet and gentle rendition of the Muppets song, with Toria’s voice the purest I’ve ever heard it, innocent and childlike while deftly avoiding even the hint of twee or festive syrup. Polly smiles warmly, her cello itself almost a call-and-response to Toria’s singing. As absurd as it may sound to anyone who is not here to experience it, Toria is not wrong in believing this captures the spirit of Christmas. Her breathless melody “with a thankful heart” reminds everyone in the room of the warmth of the winter season, a glow that comes from sharing life with other people that we all accepted intuitively as children but forget as we grow older. This serene joy does not banish or conquer the sadness which Toria has acknowledged in other songs tonight, but instead shows how light can exist alongside darkness; how they are not even two sides of the same coin but exist in one permeable area, like rain falling into the ocean, and only by embracing both can you find a way forward. Toria can sing of her loss and her pain even as she can sing, now, of “how precious life can be” and how “even if we part, I will hold you close with a thankful heart.”
The audience, hushed throughout, breaks into deserved applause at the song’s end. The applause continues as Toria leaves the stage and morphs into shouts for an encore. Toria obligingly returns to rejoin Polly and jokes, “We’re going to do the whole of The Muppets. I’ll be Michael Caine.”
Instead, she shuffles through the sheet music again and places a piece of paper on the lectern. “Right, ok. We’re going to do a little singalong. It’s not going to be fun and cheery – it’s a Robert Burns poem. I think it’s actually a funeral song. And it’s technically not a Christmas song either – it’s a New Year’s song. So have a little sing together. You guys can sing the chorus with me.”
What follows stuns those of us in the audience so much that we all forget to sing along. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is a song so ubiquitous at this time of year that we can often forget the latent power of it – but not tonight. On a night of timeless folk music penned almost exclusively by herself, this is the perfect capstone: Toria Wooff playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as though it were written just yesterday, pulled from fresh soil.
Toria’s own heartache and loss finds expression in the song, and when she sings “And surely you will buy a pint, and surely I’ll buy mine; We’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne”, we know whose name puts power behind it. In ‘Thankful Heart’, Toria sang of how “if you need to know the measure of a man, you simply count his friends,” but in ‘Auld Lang Syne’ she shows that friendship is not measured only in number but in depth, and if Alicia experienced this quality of friendship and love from such a remarkable artist, she must have been a blessèd lady indeed, for all her woe.
Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? I debate whether I should even write any of this, for it is not my story to share. But I have witnessed an artist with emotional bravery tonight, and at moments, watching her closely on the stage, it has been as though Toria might waver, that the gestures to the alcove at the back of the room, or ‘Song for A’ and ‘Sweet William’ reverberating from the walls of their old haunt, might be too much to bear.
But her performance tonight, her decision to turn pain and loss into art and beauty, is worth noting for posterity. For Toria seems to know – intuitively, if not consciously – that the ghost story she carries along with her is not a curse. In true Gothic fashion, the darkness is a harbour; not only a place of shelter for the memories of Christmas Past but a place for the Ghosts of Christmases Yet to Come to gather and find their path forward.
Toria’s performance tonight is not merely admirable, but the epitome of true artistic expression: to roll back Death, even while inviting one’s ghosts inside and making peace with them. This Woman in Black bears her loss far less malevolently than the one of Susan Hill’s creation, choosing instead to respond to hardship with life and increasingly impressive art – sweet Williams planted in black and tilled soil.
Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Tonight, Toria Wooff has given Rabbie Burns’ rhetorical question a definitive answer.
Setlist:
(all songs from the album Toria Wooff and written by Toria Wooff, unless noted)
- Black Shuck (unreleased)
- The Morrigan (unreleased)
- Estuaries
- Lefty’s Motel Room
- Sweet William
- Song for A
- The Waltz of Winter Hey
- Noiselessly (unreleased)
- Aleister (unreleased)
- The Flood
- House on the Hill (unreleased)
- That’s What Falling in Love Will Do
- See Things Through
- Thankful Heart (Paul Williams) (unreleased)
- Encore: Auld Lang Syne (Robert Burns/Traditional) (unreleased)
My other concert reviews can be found here.
My fiction writing can be found here.
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